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Features
Virginia Tech: Fighting Viruses on Campus
4/29/2003
By William Dougherty
The use of e-mail has increased
dramatically over the last several years. It has become an essential form of
communication, surpassing even the telephone for many people. For faculty, staff,
and students, it has become the primary means of communicating. However, e-mail
has one weakness the telephone d'esn't—susceptibility to computer viruses.
Internet Infections
Viruses are the bane of university IT departments. Given the critical importance
of e-mail, it's absolutely crucial to protect it. Three main types of viruses
can be found online today:
File infectors generally attach themselves to program files, like .com or .exe files. When the program is loaded, the virus is loaded as well. Other file infector viruses infect computers as programs or scripts sent as an attachment to an e-mail message.
System or boot-record infectors infect code in areas on a disk. They attach to the DOS boot sector on diskettes or the Master Boot Record on hard disks. When placed in a drive with the computer off, an infected disk will launch this virus, which will proceed to damage your files.
Macro viruses are very common but not very dangerous. Macro viruses affect Microsoft Word applications, adding new words and phrases to documents.
Securing Protection
So how do universities handle this dilemma? At Virginia Tech, our e-mail system
serves more than 70,000 users among faculty, staff, and students. Like many
universities, we based our major effort on virus protection available for users'
desktops. Unfortunately, we learned quickly that this was insufficient.
Over the past two years, a plague of new viruses has emerged on the Internet. Viruses were getting into our system and spreading among users at an alarming rate. By the spring semester of 2001, we were collecting 50,000 viruses a day on our system. Our help desk was receiving 10 to 20 calls per day from frustrated students and faculty. Some of these calls were taking up to 30 minutes or longer to resolve. At the height of the problem, the help desk was tied up for 3 hours a day on virus issues.
Messaging Needs
We realized we needed a better, more proactive security method, one that was
not solely dependent on users maintaining up-to-date files on their computers.
After surveying various possibilities, we decided on a system that has been designed and optimized to specifically handle messaging—unlike other strictly software or piecemeal solutions. Mirapoint Inc.'s platform is essentially a messaging appliance—a specialized server with special software that can address a variety of messaging needs.
Historically, customers have purchased separate hardware and storage components along with general-purpose operating systems to address their messaging requirements. This approach required costly integration of heterogeneous components to create complete messaging services.
In contrast, Mirapoint's approach delivers purpose-built, integrated messaging systems that help eliminate the complications associated with traditional deployment of messaging services. With Mirapoint's purpose-built approach, we were able to deploy services more rapidly than systems that require integration between software, hardware, and other components.
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